by Ted Conover
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957
“Take your shirt off, please. Show me your hands, both sides. Now, arms away from your body. Turn around. Okay.”
A nod when we’re finished, and we move on to the next cell. He’s heard us coming and wants to know why.
“You can probably guess. Just do it, please.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“The sergeant will come, and they’ll write you up.” The man sighs, shrugs, pulls his T-shirt over his head, does the dance. We move on to the next cell.
B-block is locked down, and we’re looking for knife cuts. It is May. For the third day in a row, the Latin Kings have been attacking the Bloods, and vice versa. Not en masse—just stealth encounters, stabbings without warning. One incident provokes the next; we’re told that the cycles of retaliation began at Rikers Island earlier this month. Each time we let the inmates back out, someone else is attacked, violence flaring up like one of those trick birthday candles.
The sergeant wouldn’t say why we were conducting these “upper-body frisks,” but it doesn’t take a genius: The white-shirts think that at least one participant in the latest cutting exchange, though wounded, escaped undetected. So we’re looking for blood, skin that needs stitching, a gash from a homemade blade.
At the next cell, the inmate is lying on his bunk. “R-63, take off your shirt, please.” He sits up bleary-eyed, then stands, removes the shirt. Like many inmates, he’s in excellent shape from weight lifting. And like many inmates, he has scars: three inches long on his waist below the ribs, about one inch long on his arm, penny-size circles that look like two bullet wounds on a shoulder blade.
“Nothing fresh,” says the officer I’m with, more to himself than in dismissal. He’s an old-timer who doubts we’ll find anything and acts like he’s seen it all before. I’m not so world-weary. The huge number of scars surprises me. Half the inmates seem to have been stabbed or shot at some point in their lives. Often, the scars are on their face: a pale, thick line across the back of the skull where no hair grows, a sliced nostril imperfectly healed, a gash along a cheek that ended when the blade passed through a lip. The most ghastly wound is on a man who looks about nineteen: a ragged cicatrix that winds from one corner of his mouth to beneath his left ear, then all the way around his head, under the right ear, and back to the other corner of the mouth, as though the assailant intended to peel off the top: a sadist’s trophy.
We continue down the line. Gash after gash after gash. But nothing fresh.
There are drawbacks, but overall lockdowns are a pleasure. When the inmates are all locked in their cells, most of what is stressful in the life of a block officer goes away. The galleries are clear, at least until trash begins to accumulate. The gates stay closed. The PA system stays quiet, because there is nothing the inmates need to be told.
Lockdowns follow what are officially known as unusual incidents. Besides gang-related violence, that can mean attacks on guards, problems with the count (an inmate missing from his cell), or even the discovery of especially scary contraband, like the stash of bullets, zip gun, and bags of marijuana that were found in the basement of the mess hall later that year, all inside Styrofoam boxes sealed with clear tape. The commissioner of corrections has to approve all lockdowns, because they are stressful to inmates, essentially turning them all into keeplocks.
I was surprised to hear B-block was still locked down when I came to work the next day, but not upset about it. I walked over to Mama Cradle, the B-block OIC, with my old classmate Bella.
Bella had distinguished himself in our training class by being the only person to flunk the first-aid course, a requirement for graduation. It wasn’t for lack of trying. A thirty-something father of two, he badly wanted this job, but he had barely passed his other exams, and first aid had stumped him. Of course Nigro had let him take the test again; I and a couple of others helped him study before he did, because he was a nice guy, hapless but good-natured. Everyone applauded when Nigro announced that Bella had finally passed.
We became friendly after that. Bella told me he’d had problems at a New Jersey detention facility for minors, where he’d been a counselor/guard—some of the kids had escaped during his watch. He was exonerated, because two other employees who were supposed to be supervising the kids with him had not turned up for work. Bella had grown up in the Bronx and attended a tough high school near where I lived; his brother was a cop. He missed his kids a lot during our weeks at the Academy, as I missed mine, and we talked about that. He had an application in for a New Jersey road-maintenance job, but nothing had come of it yet.
Mama Cradle told us there was nothing for us to do just then, but we shouldn’t stray far—and should not venture out onto the flats. This was because, to relieve their boredom and express their contempt, inmates were occasionally tossing items out of their cells in hopes they might hit one of us. Alcantara, in fact, had been drenched with what appeared to be water and was sent off to change his uniform. So we hung near Cradle’s office, where there was a ledge over our heads, then migrated to the gym and used some of the inmates’ exercise equipment until Cradle called us back to her office.
“I want you guys to do the feed-up,” she directed a group of us new officers. “Then later you’ll pick up the trays.” She pointed us to a pile of large garbage bags.
That was the downside of lockdowns: having to do the inmates’ scut work. But Bella never seemed to complain, and with him as my partner, I didn’t mind, either. We joined other new officers in the mess hall, where I held a tray and Bella stacked it high with Styrofoam “clamshells” full of beef stew and rice. Maneuvering with this load took skill. I descended a narrow staircase from the mess hall to R-gallery very carefully, because with the trays stacked high, I couldn’t see in front of me. It got worse on R, where no one had swept or picked up in many hours. The floor of the narrow gallery was an obstacle course—littered with chicken bones from dinner the night before, toast from breakfast, jam packets and scrambled eggs, spilled coffee and juice, covered by a layer of Styrofoam cups and clamshells. I waded slowly, blindly, determined not to fall and entertain the inmates. Bella handed out meals, amazingly upbeat. Something about this assignment cheered him.
“He-e-e-re’s lunch!” he announced at cell after cell, undaunted by silence and surliness. “Why don’t they send up some chicks instead of you ugly motherfuckers?” was the nicest thing we heard. “The beer’s coming,” Bella would say in return, or simply, “Have a nice day!” I took little steps forward.
We made a second round, passing out juice and coffee, and then killed time on the south-end staircase. He’d put in for a transfer to Bedford Hills, Bella said. I didn’t have to ask why he was transferring to a prison farther from home, but did so anyway. “For the calmness,” he answered. “And because of some of the officers here.” More than the inmates, Bella was put off by the way the more senior officers treated us. They issued orders, neglected to explain procedures, were eager to lay blame, and tried to humiliate us.
We gave the inmates twenty minutes or so to finish their meals, then set back down the gallery wearing latex gloves and bearing huge trash bags. A dismal assignment, I thought: garbagemen to the inmates. Bella was unfazed and, in fact, began to sing the theme from Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood:
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,
A beautiful day for a neighbor…
He sang it again and again, smiling when the inmates stared at him as if he were crazy and smiling when I stared at him in admiration. Forget his test scores: Bella knew a secret way to handle all the crap, and I envied him.
Part of maturing into a regular officer at Sing Sing was deciding whether you were an A-block person or a B-block person. Somehow, Sergeant Holmes formed an idea of where you belonged and then tended to send you there. This was not always accomplished through intuition. Some guards would start out at A-block, then lock horns with Sergeant Wickersham, and thereafter be sentenced by mutual agre
ement to B-block. Others would begin at B-block, get turned off by the greater chaos factor—the younger, more transient inmates or the higher incidence of gang violence—and head back to A-block. The deciding difference for some officers appeared to be architecture. Though the two buildings were quite similar, some felt—as I did—that A-block’s longer galleries (eighty-eight cells long) were that much more unmanageable than B-block’s (sixty-eight cells long). Others preferred A-block’s modernized though undependable electronic locking system to B-block’s ancient, manually operated brakes and levers. There tended to be more white officers bidding A-block and more officers of color bidding B-block, but there were many exceptions. Though I spent more time in A-block early on, I turned into a committed B-block person and eventually bid it myself. And I would have to say the main factor behind that for me was Mama Cradle.
There are some people in this life that you mysteriously like the moment you see them, and Mama was that way for me. I had no good reason to like her. She would sometimes reassign me from easy jobs that Holmes had given me to hard ones, and in the beginning, especially, she had a low opinion of me. But I liked her. I liked her aura, her toughness, her … shape. The novelist Jim Harrison once wrote of dancing for five hours in Mexico with “a maiden who resembled a beige bowling ball.” (“She was, in fact, shaped rather like me,” he wrote.) I’m married to a slender woman, but Mama was that appealing round girl to me—spherical but solid—and I always pictured us together on a dance floor, my hands in no danger of meeting behind her back.
Inexplicably, I wanted to please Cradle. At the beginning, I always failed. She assigned me to the center gate and Q-south, the gallery next to her office and told me, “I don’t want to see nobody out where they ain’t supposed to be.” I ran them as strictly as I could but confronted the limits of my ability when the keeplocks returned from their rec. Two of them ran past their cells and, despite my commands to stop, past me, up to the gate, where they hollered for Cradle.
“Mama got to help me with this form,” said one.
“I’ll help you with the form after you lock in,” I told him. “Direct order.”
He ignored me and kept hollering for Cradle, who eventually walked over, telling one of the men to go into his cell and the other to come see her. When she ignored me as he had, I knew I’d messed up. I was new, and they didn’t respect me. I wondered what it took, and in hindsight, I wished I’d knocked down or tackled the little one. It might have been seen as an overreaction, but at least I would have gotten everyone’s attention.
Later in the day Mama replaced me on the gate with a larger, more senior officer and sent me to patrol the gym. I felt she was sending me a message, and at the end of the day I told her I’d do better tomorrow. If Mama wanted me to run, I’d run.
I did fare a bit better the next day, and the day after that, Mama sent me to V-gallery, at the back, where Officer Smith had taught me so well during my training. Smith was gone for a while, she explained. “And it ain’t V-Rec today—remember!” she warned, meaning, nobody out when they weren’t supposed to be.
Without Smith there, of course, that was easier said than done. Inmates asserted privilege in time-tested ways that were difficult to deny (“I’m the head yard porter, CO, so I’ve got to get out there before they drop rec—Smitty always just lets me wait by the door down there.”). And inmates from other galleries dropped by, some of them for legitimate reasons (the law library porter was supposed to be walking around picking up and dropping off books) and some not (errant gallery porters from other floors who parked themselves in front of their buddies’ cells were a constant problem).
Aragon was working Q-south, a short gallery that I handled the paperwork for, and, probably unlike any of his predecessors, he thought it important to turn in mental-health referrals on a couple of his inmates who seemed in need of help. While we were in my office looking for the forms, two or three unauthorized inmates apparently appeared on the gallery and were noticed by some wandering senior officer, who, knowing we were new and vulnerable, tattled to Cradle. Soon we heard ourselves summoned over the PA system. We walked over and squished ourselves into Cradle’s office, where she chewed us out.
“What did I say about keeping your galleries clear?” she demanded. “Can you do it, or do I need to find someone else?”
We said we could do it, and I thought Aragon felt the same respect and grudging affection for Cradle that I felt. But as soon as we were out of earshot, he said, “I can’t stand that bitch! I’m running that gallery better than at least ninety percent of officers do.”
Inmates also had somewhat polarized reactions to Cradle. Seeing her anywhere in the block besides the OIC office provoked comment, because Mama’s physical stature seemed to keep her from venturing very far. Not that she was frail. I was on a gallery upstairs one day and after she ambled by, two inmates started talking about her in terms I can only describe as admiring: “Mama gonna kick you in the nuts, and you gonna start to fall. Then she gonna get you with an uppercut and knock your head back. You think you bad, but Mama gonna show you who’s toughest.”
Another day, I saw her infuriate some inmates on R-gallery north, just above her office. She was in the middle of dropping runs when she stepped from her office out onto the flats to gaze up at the front-side galleries. What she saw was a lot of inmates out of their cells when they weren’t supposed to be, hanging out mainly in anticipation of rec.
“Officers, clear your galleries!” she called into the PA microphone. “I’m not calling another run until all those inmates are in their cells! Clear your galleries!”
That day was the commissary run for R-gallery, and the inmates right above her office put their faces to the chain-link fence and started yelling at her. The issue wasn’t really Mama herself but Sing Sing’s poor administration: The commissary didn’t always have room for all the inmates who were allowed a buy, and often those who weren’t at the front of the line downstairs didn’t get to go. Mama, however, with her loud voice and take-no-lip approach, was their lightning rod. The inmates started getting abusive, and Mama, of course, yelled right back. She wouldn’t budge. Pretty soon, with countless inmates from other floors joining in, it sounded like Mama against the world. I quickly joined a group of officers who marched upstairs to get the R inmates to lock in. It was a fight for Mama’s dignity! We spread ourselves out, made our presence known to the main instigators. I stood right next to one man who was directing a particularly abusive string of epithets toward Mama. He ignored me, so I told him to stop. Still he ignored me, so I asked for his I.D. He gave it to me, but then, like a true knucklehead, kept on swearing. I wrote him up (106.10, direct order; 107.10, interference with staff; and 107.11, verbal harassment). I did it for Mama.
Though Mama seemed aware of my shortcomings, Sergeant Holmes kept assigning me to V-gallery, and somebody finally told me that Mama must be requesting me. “You’re kidding,” I said, truly amazed. It was the first hint of praise I’d received, however indirectly, from anyone at Sing Sing. I didn’t think Cradle even knew my name. Others confirmed that Mama had daily conversations with Holmes about whom she wanted back and whom she didn’t. They had a warm relationship. I answered her phone one day when she was away from the desk, and Holmes said, “Is L.B. there?”
“L.B.?”
“Cradle,” he said. “Is Ms. Cradle there?”
“It’s for you, L.B.,” I told her a moment later, and when she hung up, I asked what that stood for.
“Oh, L.B.?” she said with a wide smile. “Little Bitch.”
Officers who weren’t assigned to galleries had time at the end of the shift to laze around and chat a bit. One day I heard Cradle advise one whose two weeks of vacation were coming up that he “shouldn’t just sit around at home, like all the other COs do on vacation. Go somewhere.”
“Like, what do you mean?”
“Like Colonial Williamsburg.” Cradle mentioned an officer friend who had just returned from a package tour
to the Virginia attraction and sang its praises. The officer gazed into the distance. “Colonial Williamsburg,” he said. He’d never go.
Another time little Baez, the front-gate officer, was talking about what he’d do when he got home—the cold beer, the game on TV, the relatives coming over. He asked Cradle about her evening.
“Cook dinner, wash my hair, set it,” she said.
“Set your hair?” asked Baez. “You sleep with rollers, Mama?” He was intrigued. Cradle didn’t wear her hair natural, but in a wavy do. It took some time. She put up with the officers asking tongue-in-cheek questions about her procedures.
An officer like me hadn’t been there long enough to see the change, but older ones clued me in to the upsetting news: Cradle was burning out. After seventeen years on the job, fourteen of them in B-block, she was showing signs of stress. A couple of these signs I recognized, such as the way she’d press her left hand to her forehead and close her eyes when some officer, usually a new one like me, committed an error like losing a keeplock or dropping a run at the wrong time. Or she would get into loud arguments with inmates. I’d taken it all as just part of her style, but apparently it wasn’t. Rumor had it she was exploring transfer options and might be headed on to Fishkill or Downstate. Of all times, I thought. Just when I’d arrived.
8/24/97 7:05 a.m. CO T Conover on duty with census of R-63 and W-64 and 4 sets of keys, PAS #831, 2nd officers Corbie and Cespedes, and the following K/L’s: R-3, 6, 11, 12, 20, 26, 28 (adj.), 42, 51, 52, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, and W-10, 23, 28, 46, 47, 55, 60, 61.
A new page in the logbook began each of my shifts as a gallery officer. Like untold numbers of officers before me, I acknowledged receiving the equipment of the previous officer (keys and PAS, or Personal Alarm System—the radio with the emergency pull-cord) and the essential numbers regarding inmates. The activity was half brain-dead ritual and half Cover Your Ass (“I didn’t know he was a keeplock, Lieutenant—the list I was given didn’t have him on it!”). I didn’t mind the logbook as much as the officers who cringed at paperwork of any kind did. But I was depressed by what it represented—the hours measured, the boredom of inmates and irritation of officers, the ticking of the clock, the niggling accountability. What the upstate union rep had told me years earlier about an officer’s career amounting to “a life sentence in eight-hour shifts” seemed to be encapsulated in that big red-bound ledger.